Tuesday, February 02, 2016

A few weeks back I went out to the Tampa Java (JVM) User Group meeting to watch Venkat Subramaniam speak about Lambdas and functional programming with Java 8. I have already read his book, Functional Programming in Java: Harnessing the Power Of Java 8 Lambda Expressions, on the topic but I could not pass up on the opportunity to see him speak in person. I make every attempt to see speakers/authors/programmers, such as Venkat, in person because for me it is like a spiritual experience for my (programmer) soul. Many people attend places of worship to hear a community leader speak about known truths, to hear the truth from someone who believes passionately in these truths of life. People are there to reaffirm their beliefs and walk away from a positive experience with a sense of improved strength. It is invigorating and it revives their personal life to help them with their days ahead. The same thing happens when I attend events like the Tampa Java (JVM) User Group meeting last month. Venkat's presentation and live programming invigorated my (programmer) soul as he spoke about the truths we developers face on a daily basis. He elaborated on how we approach simple problems with an abundance of complexity, how we are gluttons for punishment as we write multi-threaded code to guarantee we will struggle to recreate that production defect in our tests as we run the debugger. I truly appreciate the passionate speakers/authors/programmers that evangelize the truth with an incredible amount of passion for the craft of programming, who invigorate our (programmer) souls so we can continue on our programming mission for a lifetime of learning and personal growth.